"And yet when I say "strange loop", I have something else in mind — a
less concrete, more elusive notion. What I mean by "strange loop" is —
here goes a first stab, anyway — not a physical circuit but an abstract
loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the
cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or
structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a
hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to
give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one's sense of departing
ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, exactly
where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical
level-crossing feedback loop."

— Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, pp. 101-102

"In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference."

— Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, p. 363

Someone drew my attention to these quotations with reference to the fashion for #seapunk. Which in turn led me to concoct #dogpunk, #catpunk, #memepunk and the Tudor innuendo #methinkspunk.

With first mover advantage, I define #memepunk as "the ultimate DIY of ephemeral teratology" ...

Further Reading

"Eight Aspects of grotesque kitsch and freaky metamorphosis." Available Here.

Our society is populated by cyborg discourses, robotics, genetic modification, zombie studies and newly emergent teratologies. But Hobbes' reconstruction of the traditional notion of the body politic as a man machine makes fascinating reading. It also provides a dark allegory of human nature, greed and self-interest.

If you ever imagined that political theory was a dull, disembodied discourse, take another look at the introduction to Hobbes' Leviathan, published in 1651.

NATURE, the art whereby God hath made and governs
the world, is by the ‘art,’ of man, as in many other things, so in this
also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life
is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal
part within; why may we not say, that all ‘automata’ (engines that move
themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial
life? For what is the ‘heart’ but a ‘spring’; and the ‘nerves’ but so
many ‘strings’; and the ‘joints’ but so many ‘wheels,’ giving motion to
the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer? ‘Art’ goes yet
further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature,
‘man.’

For by art is created that great ‘Leviathan’ called a
‘Commonwealth’ or ‘State,’ in Latin civitas, which is but an
artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural,
for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the
‘sovereignty’ is an artificial ‘soul,’ as giving life and motion to the
whole body; the ‘magistrates’ and other ‘officers’ of judicature and
execution, artificial ‘joints’; ‘reward’ and ‘punishment,’ by which
fastened to the seat of the sovereignty every joint and member is moved
to perform his duty, are the ‘nerves,’ that do the same in the body
natural; the ‘wealth’ and ‘riches’ of all the particular members are the
‘strength’; salus populi, the ‘people’s safety,’ its ‘business’;
‘counsellors,’ by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested
unto it, are the ‘memory’; ‘equity’ and ‘laws,’ an artificial ‘reason’
and ‘will’; ‘concord,’ ‘health’; ‘sedition,’ ‘sickness’; and ‘civil
war,’ ‘death.’ Lastly, the ‘pacts’ and ‘covenants’, by which the parts
of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united,
resemble that ‘fiat,’ or the ‘let us make man,’ pronounced by God in the
creation.

Text: Hobbes' Leviathan (1651)

Militarism and Colonialism: Monster cartography. See below! More here.

Also worth exploring is L'homme Machine / The Man Machine (1748) by La Mettrie (1709-1751), discussed by Karl Popper:
"Yet the doctrine that man is a machine was argued most
forcefully in 1751, long before the theory of evolution became generally
accepted, by de La Mettrie; and the theory of evolution gave the
problem an even sharper edge, by suggesting there may be no clear
distinction between living matter and dead matter. And, in spite of the victory of the new quantum
theory, and the conversion of so many physicists to indeterminism de La
Mettrie's doctrine that man is a machine has perhaps more defenders than
before among physicists, biologists and philosophers; especially in the
form of the thesis that man in a computer."

Wednesday, 12 December 2012

Last night I chose to listen to a CD recording of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk produced in 1990. A couple of hours later I heard that Galina Vishnevskaya had died. What a sad loss. Hearing the opera again led me to reconsider her life, and the strange opera in which she sings the leading soprano role. The opera, like her life, was a stormy affair.

Stalin famously walked out of a performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, leading to a denunciation of the opera in the infamous Pravda
article "Chaos instead of music" in 1936

For more than twenty years Shostakovich's opera remained in limbo as a shameful, hideous example of what Pravda's editorial called "din, gnash and screech", "cacophony" and "musical noise"

A 1935 review in the New York Sun called it "pornophony", referring to the lurid descriptive music in the sex scenes. Stravinsky described the opera as "lamentably provincial", considering the musical portrayal primitively realistic.

The EMI Libretto booklet notes that "The police force in Lady Macbeth is at once frightening and amusing. At the same time, Shostakovich by the very unfolding of the conflict emphasizes that the existence of such a grotesque and horrifying mechanism is possible only in a society that is built on violence, from top to bottom." p. 10.

Daniil Zhitomirsky accused the work of "primitive satire" in its
treatment of the priest and police, but acknowledges the "incredible
force" of the last scene. [Wikipedia]

The opera still has the power to shock. Reviewing a performance of the Opera at Staatstheater Wiesbaden on May 16,
2005 the critic summarised the plot as follows:

"In the first five scenes,
they had witnessed the brutal rape of a maid, had seen Katerina
sexually fantasizing (masturbating) in her bed, and then having
sex with Sergei. They were forced to watch Katerina's sadistic
father-in-law Boris whip Sergei to within inches of his life and
then see Boris himself die, writhing in agony after eating rat
poison. And finally, before the curtain came down for the interval,
they gaped in horror as Katerina and her lover strangled her husband
Zinovy to death."

Her star began to wane in 1969 when Rostropovich offered his friend, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, sanctuary in his dacha outside Moscow after discovering that
the dissident writer was living in a shack without heat or running water.
Rostropovich came under official pressure to evict him, but the musician not
only refused, he wrote an open letter to the press in which he proclaimed
that “Each human being must have the right to think for himself and to
express his opinion without fear.

Almost immediately, Rostropovich’s name disappeared from the billboards owing,
according to the official line, to his “decline as a musician”. Galina
Vishnevskaya, who had urged caution on her husband, was initially allowed to
continue performing. But she found that she had become a non-person; when
she sang the lead in Prokofiev’s The Gambler, her name was not even
mentioned in the reviews.

Further Reading

Wilson, Elizabeth (1994). Shostakovich: A Life Remembered. Princeton University Press

Tuesday, 11 December 2012

H.G. Wells's The Outline of History (1921) includes this graphic description of the
Neanderthal:

We know nothing of the appearance of the Neanderthal man, but this absence of intermixture seems to suggest an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive strangeness in his appearance over and above his low forehead, his beetle brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature. Or he"and she"may have been too fierce to tame. Says Sir Harry Johnston, in a survey of the rise of modern man in his Views and Reviews: The dim racial remembrance of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibalistic tendencies, may he the germ of the ogre in folklore...p.40

Bernard F. Dick, has pointed out that William Golding derived his inspiration for The Inheritors from this passage, as the novelist explained:

Wells' Outline of History played a great part in my life because my father was a rationalist, and the Outline was something he took neat. Well now, Wells' Outline of History is the rationalist's gospel in excelsis, I should think. I got this from my father, and by and by it seemed to me not to be large enough. It seemed to me to be too neat and slick. And when I re-read it as an adult I came across his picture of Neanderthal man, our immediate predecessors, as being the gross brutal creatures who were possibly the basis of the mythological bad man, whatever he may be, the ogre. I thought to myself that this is just absurd. What we're
doing is externalizing our inside. ["The Meaning of It All," 10.]

In his chapter on Golding, Dick concludes that

The Neanderthals are not the heroes, nor are the New People the villains
of the novel. If the New People are the "true men," as Wells called
moderns in the Outline, if they are supposed to tower over the
rest of creation, they should be capable of using their intellect to
quell their dark, demonic urges. Yet the opposite is true: the New
People are less able to master them than the Neanderthals. Each rung on
the evolutionary ladder brings additional knowledge, but always at a
price.

Lisa Fluet further explores TS Eliot's participation - as a book reviewer - in the debate on Darwinism between Wells and Belloc.

Where do we put Eliot's Apeneck Sweeney in this discussion?

Any thoughts on Eliot's monstrous modernity?

Postscript

"As for the men of my time who have been able to capture a large
audience . . . they are all, by comparison with Mr. Wells, pygmies." --- T. S. Eliot, "Wells as Journalist"

Monday, 10 December 2012

This was the 1st of one thousand short blogs on deformity, the monstrous, and the grotesque.

I'm not sure why I wanted to start with one of Scott's least-read fictions. Perhaps reading it recalled Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and my Yorkshire ancestry? Recent critics have indeed claimed to find similiarities between the two texts (see further reading, below). After selecting some of the most noteworthy quotations I will be offering 13 observations on the text.

"The ideal being who is here presented as residing in solitude, and haunted by a consciousness of his own deformity and a suspicion of his being generally subjected to the scorn of his fellow men, is not altogether imaginary. An individual existed many years since, under the Author's observation, which suggested such a character. this poor unfortunate man's name was David Ritchie, an native of Tweeddale."

The Introduction to The Black Dwarf also quotes from the Scots Magazine (1817: i.207)

"His skull," says this authority, "which was of an oblong, and rather unusual shape, was of such strength that he could strike it with ease through the panel of a door or the end of a tar barrel. His laugh is said to have been quite horrible; and is screech-owl-voice, shrill, uncouth, and dissonant, corresponded well with his other peculiarities."

"He never wore shoes, being unable to adapt them to his misshapen fin-like feet, but always had both feet and legs quite concealed, and wrapt up with pieces of cloth."

"A jealous, misanthropical, and irritable temper was his most prominent characteristic. The sense of his deformity haunted him like a phantom; and the insults and scorn to which this exposed him had poisoned his heart with fierce and bitter feelings, which, from other traits in his character, do not appear to have been largely infused into his original temperament than that of his fellow-men.

"He detested children, on account of their propensity to insult and persecute him. To strangers he was generally reserved, crabbed, and surly; and though he by no means refused assistance or charity, he on many occasions neither expressed nor exhibited much gratitude."

Ther author proceeds to speculate, in his introduction

Nature maintains a certain balance of good and evil in all her works; and there is no state perhaps so utterly desolate which does not possess some source of gratification peculiar to itself. This poor man, whose misanthropy was founded sense of his own preternatural deformity, had yet his own particular enjoyments. driven into solitude, he became an admirer of the beauties of nature. His garden, which he sedulously cultivated, and from a piece of wild moorland made a very productive spot, was his pride and delight; but he was also an admirer of more natural beauty: the soft sweep of the green hill, the bubbling of a clear fountain, or the complexities of a wild thicket, were scenes on which he gazed for hours, and, he said, with inexpressible delight. it was perhaps for this reason that he was fond of Shenstone's pastorals and some parts of Paradise Lost. The Author has heard his most unmusical voice repeat the celebrated description of Paradise, which he seemed fully to appreciate."

"He expressed disgust at the idea of his remains being mixed with the common rubbish, as he called it, of the churchyard, and selected with his usual taste a beautiful and wild spot in the glen where he had his hermitage, in which to take his last repose. He changed his mind, however, and was finally interred in the common burial-ground of Manor parish."

"The Author has invested Wise Elshie with some qualities which made him appear, in the eyes of the vulgar, a man possessed of supernatural power. common fame paid David Ritchie a similar compliment, for some of the poor and ignorant, as well as all the children in the neigbourhood, held him to be what is called 'uncanny.' He himself did not altogether the idea; it enlarged his very limited circle of power, and in so far gratified his conceit; and it soothed his misanthropy, by increasing his means of giving terror or pain. But even in a rude Scottish glen thirty years back the fear of sorcery was very much out of date."

"David Ritchie affected to frequent solitary scenes, especially such as were supposed to be haunted, and valued himself upon his courage in doing so. To be sure, he had little chance of meeting anything more ugly than himself."

"David often received gratuities from strangers, which he never asked, never refused, and never seemed to consider as an obligation. he had a right, indeed, to regard himself as one of Nature's paupers, to whom she gave a title to be maintained by his kind, even by that deformity which closed against him all ordinary ways of supporting himself by his own labour."

"When he died, in the beginning of the present century, he was found to have hoarded about twenty pounds, a habit very consistent with his disposition; for wealth is power, and power was what David Ritchie desired to possess, as a compensation for his exclusion from society."

"Dr Fergusson considered him as a man of a powerful capacity and original ideas, but whose mind was thrown off its just bias by a predominant degree of self-love, and self-opinion, galled by the sense of ridicule and contempt, and avenging itself upon society, in idea at least, by a gloomy misanthropy."

"The story was intended to be longer, and the catastrophe more artificially brought out; but a friendly critic, to whose opinion I subjected the work in its progress, was of opinion that the idea of the Solitary was of as kind too revolting, and more likely to disgust than to interest the reader. as I had a good right to consider my adviser as an excellent judge of public opinion, I got off my subject by hastening the story to an end as fast as it was possible; and by huddling into one volume a tale which was designed to occupy two, have perhaps produced a narrative as much disproportioned and distorted as the Black Dwarf who is its subject."

Observations

Scott’s portrait is multiple and ambiguous

The grotesque seldom partakes of unqualified horror or unmixed disgust. Scott draws on the Ritchie’s aesthetic temperament as a redeeming feature

Scott has shown that Ritchie’s ill-temper is the product of society’s hostility to him, rather than innate

Ritchie resembles Frankenstein’s monster insofar as there is a link to the appreciation of Nature and poetry, namely John Milton’s Paradise Lost

But he is also Satan, the outsider and observer of a paradise from which he is excluded. John Milton’s Paradise Lost again

Ritchie is a romantic and solitary figure, located in nature. His physical deformity is a product of nature. (Rather than a result of a supernatural curse.)

The social fabric of society supports him through charity

Common preconception that the diminutive in size, inevitably seek power. They also suffer from an inward turn. On both counts note period satires on Napoleon Bonaparte.

Interesting to have a “description” of his voice – the monstrous tends to rely on the visual effigy.

The deformity is physical but it is also phenomenal and gothic; it is something that haunts him.

He is outside of humanity (“common rubbish”) but his destiny, in death, is to rejoin it.

The novel is a grotesque. Two in One. Scott also wrote that he was “tired of the ground I had trode so often before I had walked over two thirds of the course. [...] So I quarrelled with my story, & bungled up a conclusion as a boarding school Miss finishes a task which she had commenced with great glee & accuracy” (Letter to Lady Louisa Stuart: 14 November 1816.)

Gordon, Robert C. "The Bride of Lammermoor: A Novel of Tory Pessimism." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 12.2 (1957): 110-124. "Two other novels reveal Scott's deepening awareness of the tragic possibilities in themutations of human history. The BlackDwarf, the most abortive of the Waverley Novels, is a study in the misanthropy of a deformed and embittered man..."

Boatright, Mody C. "Witchcraft in the Novels of Sir Walter Scott." Studies in English (1933): 95-112.

Boatright, Mody C. "Demonology in the Novels of Sir Walter Scott: A Study in Regionalism." Studies in English (1934): 75-88. "The BlackDwarf is one of the least satisfactory of Scott's tales, and the attempt at mystification with theRadcliffian ending is no small factor in the failure of the work"

Parsons, Coleman O. "The Original of the Black Dwarf." Studies in Philology 40.4 (1943): 567-575.

Friday, 2 November 2012

The frequency and popularity of trolling appears to be on the increase. This phenomenon seems to me infectious and viral, as more people are being drawn into the activity, or starting to think of it as normal behaviour.

But there is always the tendency to forget that what appears new may have been around for some time. We quickly forget the indignities of the past.

Many cultural commentators suggest that we are losing a sense of dignity and respect.

But does the Troll phenomenon precede the emergence of internet subcultures?

Is it the widening social participation of the internet, and the speed interactivity, that really fuels the apparent trending of Trollery?

Here there appears to be a sense of social or cultural prejudice, that the Trolls are the uneducated masses who have failed to learn the polite discourse and dialogue of enlightened conversational spaces.

None the less, I've recently witnessed troll fireworks in an academic list devoted to eighteenth-century studies. The reputation of Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian, was also fiercely debated recently on the same email discussion list. Again there was the sense of ephemeral and careless attacks, with others fanning the flames in other ways.

Witnessing these happenings I began to speculate about the clarity of the dividing line between the belligerent displays of antagoniosts and the monstrous behaviour of the iconoclastic Trolls.

I'm awaiting the issue of a discussion concerning the origins of immoderate debate from the academic list, and will supplement this blog when responses are communicated to me.

Bcakground: from Wikipedia:

"In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory,extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. The noun troll may refer to the provocative message itself, as in: "That was an excellent troll you posted."

While the word troll and its associated verb trolling are associated with Internet discourse, media attention in recent years has made such labels subjective, with trolling describing intentionally provocative actions and harassment outside of an online context. For example, mass media has used troll to describe "a person who defaces Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families."

"For some the word derives from a fishing term for towing bait behind a
boat, for others it comes from the Norse monsters. But today trolling
is more likely to involve a keyboard and mouse than a trawler, and if
not a monster, it is a very modern menace.
Opponents might characterise it as the internet equivalent of road rage, vandalising a grave, or kicking a man when he's down.
Trolling is a phenomenon that has swept across websites in
recent years. Online forums, Facebook pages and newspaper comment forms
are bombarded with insults, provocations or threats. Supporters argue
it's about humour, mischief and freedom of speech. But for many the
ferocity and personal nature of the abuse verges on hate speech."
...
"We're all capable of becoming a troll, says Jaron Lanier, a computer
scientist in the US and author of You Are Not A Gadget. Lanier admits he
has sometimes behaved badly online and believes the cloak of anonymity
can encourage people to react in extreme ways.
"The temptation is there and we can get caught up in
impulses. If someone reacts, it's emotional and it can be hard to get
out of. We can all become trolls."

It is in such a state of the faculties that it is entirely
natural and simple, that one should mistake a mere dumb animal for one's
relative or near connection in disguise. And, the delusion having once begun,
the deluded individual gives to every gesture and motion of limb and eye an
explanation that forwards the deception. It is in the same way that in ignorant
ages the notion of changeling has been produced. The weak and fascinated mother
sees every feature with a turn of expression unknown before, all the habits of
the child appear different and strange, till the parent herself denies her
offspring, and sees in the object so lately cherished and doated on, a monster
uncouth and horrible of aspect.

==========

Various enchantments were therefore employed by those
unhappy mortals whose special desire was to bring down calamity and plagues
upon the individuals or tribes of men against whom their animosity was
directed. Unlawful and detested words and mysteries were called into action to
conjure up demons who should yield their powerful and tremendous assistance.
Songs of a wild and maniacal character were chaunted. Noisome scents and the
burning of all unhallowed and odious things were resorted to. In later times books
and formulas of a terrific character were commonly employed, upon the reading
or recital of which the prodigies resorted to began to display themselves. The
heavens were darkened; the thunder rolled; and fierce and blinding lightnings
flashed from one corner of the heavens to the other. The earth quaked and
rocked from side to side. All monstrous and deformed things shewed themselves,
"Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire," enough to cause the
stoutest heart to quail. Lastly, devils, whose name was legion, and to whose
forms and distorted and menacing countenances superstition had annexed the most
frightful ideas, crowded in countless multitudes upon the spectator, whose
breath was flame, whose dances were full of terror, and whose strength
infinitely exceeded every thing human. Such were the appalling conceptions
which ages of bigotry and ignorance annexed to the notion of sorcery, and with
these they scared the unhappy beings over whom this notion had usurped an
ascendancy into lunacy, and prepared them for the perpetrating flagitious and
unheard-of deeds.

==========

They were at large, even though confined to the smallest
dimensions. They "could be bounded in a nutshell, and count themselves
kings of infinite space."

==========

One of the mischiefs that were most frequently imputed to
them, was the changing the beautiful child of some doating parents, for a babe
marked with ugliness and deformity.

==========

Last of all, Jupiter presented her with a sealed box, of
which the lid was no sooner unclosed, than a multitude of calamities and evils
of all imaginable sorts flew out, only Hope remaining at the bottom.

==========

On the discovery of this circumstance, Acrisius caused both
mother and child to be inclosed in a chest, and committed to the waves. The
chest however drifted upon the lands of a person of royal descent in the island
of Seriphos, who extended his care
and hospitality to both. When Perseus grew to man's estate, he was commissioned
by the king of Seriphos to bring him the head of Medusa, one of the Gorgons.

==========

reclaimed the savage man, from slaughter, and an indulgence
in food that was loathsome and foul. And this has with sufficient probability
been interpreted to mean, that he found the race of men among whom he lived
cannibals, and that, to cure them the more completely of this horrible
practice, he taught them to be contented to subsist upon the fruits of the
earth.

==========

Man in every age is full of incongruous and incompatible
principles; and, when we shall cease to be inconsistent, we shall cease to be
men.

==========

Finally he can endure this uncertainty no longer; and, in
defiance of the prohibition he has received, cannot refrain from turning his
head to ascertain whether he is baffled, and has spent all his labour in vain.
He sees her; but no sooner he sees her, than she becomes evanescent and
impalpable; farther and farther she retreats before him; she utters a shrill
cry, and endeavours to articulate; but she grows more and more imperceptible;
and in the conclusion he is left with the scene around him in all respects the
same as it had been before his incantations. The result of the whole that is
known of Orpheus, is, that he was an eminently great and virtuous man, but was
the victim of singular calamity. We have not yet done with the history of
Orpheus. As has been said, he fell a sacrifice to the resentment and fury of
the women of his native soil. They are affirmed to have torn him limb from
limb. His head, divided from his body, floated down the waters of the Hebrus,
and miraculously, as it passed along to the sea, it was still heard to exclaim
in mournful accents, Eurydice, Eurydice!At length it was carried ashore on the island
of Lesbos.Here, by some extraordinary concurrence of
circumstances, it found a resting-place in a fissure of a rock over-arched by a
cave, and, thus domiciliated, is said to have retained the power of speech, and
to have uttered oracles. Not only the people of Lesbos
resorted to it for guidance in difficult questions, but also the Asiatic Greeks
from Ionia and Aetolia; and its
fame and character for predicting future events even extended to Babylon.

==========

But Cylon, from feelings of the deepest reverence and awe
for Pythagoras, which he had cherished for years, was filled even to bursting
with inextinguishable hatred and revenge. The unparalleled merits, the
venerable age of the master whom he had so long followed, had no power to
control his violence.

==========

Yet this man, thus enlightened and philanthropical,
established his system of proceeding upon narrow and exclusive principles, and
conducted it by methods of artifice, quackery and delusion. One of his leading
maxims was, that the great and fundamental truths to the establishment of which
he devoted himself, were studiously to be concealed from the vulgar, and only
to be imparted to a select few, and after years of the severest noviciate and
trial.

==========

The authority and dogmatical assertions of the master were
to remain unquestioned; and the pupils were to fashion themselves to obsequious
and implicit submission, and were the furthest in the world from being
encouraged to the independent exercise of their own understandings. There was
nothing that Pythagoras was more fixed to discountenance, than the communication
of the truths upon which he placed the highest value, to the uninitiated. It is
not probable therefore that he wrote any thing: all was communicated orally, by
such gradations, and with such discretion, as he might think fit to adopt and
to exercise. Delusion and falsehood were main features of his instruction. With
what respect therefore can we consider, and what manliness worthy of his high
character and endowments can we impute to, his discourses delivered from behind
a curtain, his hiding himself during the day, and only appearing by night in a
garb assumed for the purpose of exciting awe and veneration?

==========

For these reasons he wrote nothing; but consigned all to the
frail and uncertain custody of tradition. And distant posterity has amply avenged
itself upon the narrowness of his policy; and the name of Pythagoras, which
would otherwise have been ranked with the first luminaries of mankind, and
consigned to everlasting gratitude, has in consequence of a few radical and
fatal mistakes, been often loaded with obloquy, and the hero who bore it been
indiscriminately classed among the votaries of imposture and artifice.

==========

After a prelude of many unintelligible sounds, uttered with
fervour and a sort of frenzy, she became by degrees more distinct. She uttered
incoherent sentences, with breaks and pauses, that were filled up with
preternatural efforts and distorted gestures; while the priests stood by,
carefully recording her words, and then reducing them into a sort of obscure
signification.

==========

Saying this, behold, the ghost of the dead man stood erect
before her, trembling at the view of his own unanimated limbs, and loth to
enter again the confines of his wonted prison. He shrinks to invest himself
with the gored bosom, and the fibres from which death had separated him.
Unhappy wretch, to whom death had not given the privilege to die! Erichtho,
impatient at the unlooked for delay, lashes the unmoving corpse with one of her
serpents. She calls anew on the powers of hell, and threatens to pronounce the
dreadful name, which cannot be articulated without consequences never to be
thought of, nor without the direst necessity to be ventured upon. At length the
congealed blood becomes liquid and warm; it oozes from the wounds, and creeps
steadily along the veins and the members; the fibres are called into action
beneath the gelid breast, and the nerves once more become instinct with life.
Life and death are there at once. The arteries beat; the muscles are braced;
the body raises itself, not by degrees, but at a single impulse, and stands
erect. The eyelids unclose. The countenance is not that of a living subject,
but of the dead. The paleness of the complexion, the rigidity of the lines,
remain; and he looks about with an unmeaning stare, but utters no sound. He
waits on the potent enchantress.